Microsoft for HR & Payroll - Case Study Arnold Laver Group

Case Study Arnold Laver Group

The United Kingdom–based Arnold Laver Group encompasses a range of businesses, including Timber World, which stocks a wide range of softwoods, hardwoods, sheet materials, laminates, joinery products, and kitchens for nationwide delivery. Arnold Laver has an annual turnover of £88 million and approximately 22,000 customers. It employs 900 people in its various business units across the U.K. and has a national production centre in Sheffield and a centralised IT facility in Bradford. Microsoft® Dynamics™ GP has given Arnold Laver a centralised accounting system that fully integrates in real time with a number of third-party products.

Situation

Timber companies are not generally perceived as being at the forefront of IT technology. However, several years ago Andrew Laver, Managing Director of Arnold Laver Group, had a vision to go against the grain by developing a fully integrated Microsoft® Windows®-based solution for the whole business. This would improve its practices in all business areas, from selling timber right through to processing accounts. At its heart would be an accounting system that would fully integrate with all its other systems, particularly a highly specialised commercial system for processing its timber stocks.

Solution

For its accounting system, the company chose Microsoft Dynamics™ GP, which it felt was easily configurable and capable of the modifications needed to meet its requirements. “We were one of the first businesses in the United Kingdom to implement it, so we quickly realised that we needed an implementation partner that would be able to support the product,” explains Colin Dean, Corporate Systems Director at Arnold Laver Group.

The company chose ICM Computer Group, a Microsoft Certified Dynamics Partner to implement the solution, due to its long standing reputation and solid reference customer base. “It doesn’t employ computer people to put in financial systems and train them in finance,” explains Dean. “It uses financial people and trains them in the software, so they understood its implications for our business. The new system went live when they said it would and since then we have gone from strength to strength.”

Although Microsoft Dynamics GP was flexible enough to be customised to provide new commercial timber system, it made economic sense to use bisTrack from Progressive Solutions in Canada. This is specialised timber industry software that can be fully integrated with Microsoft Dynamics GP. This has recently been installed for 350 users in all branches and now gives them access real-time financial information in the accounting system.

Benefits

The user benefits of the new accounting system are clear. “We now have 60 people who are motivated and trained,” says Dean. “Our accounts department loves it because it works every day and does what we want it to do.”

The business benefits were immediate. The company used to have accounting departments in Bradford and Sheffield with 20 to 30 people each. As a direct result of the improved systems from implementing Microsoft Dynamics GP, the company was able to close the Bradford office and transfer the work to Sheffield. This has reduced overheads by £250,000 a year.

The solution has significantly reduced the company’s paper trail. The accounting system integrates with Perceptive Software’s ImageNow imaging software. In the last 12 months, the company has scanned 700,000 purchase invoices, proofs of delivery, and collection notes. It is fully integrated with Microsoft Dynamics GP, so the signed delivery notes to customers are automatically linked to the sales invoice to which they relate.

The company used to file the signed A3 size delivery notes, so if a customer asked credit control for proof of delivery a member of staff had to physically retrieve the document from the files, photocopy it to a smaller size, check the quality and then fax it.

Now, when the customer wants proof of delivery, clicking on an icon brings up its image so the customer can be told immediately who signed for the timber on what date. This image can then be e-mailed, faxed, or printed to post to the customer, all from within the accounting system.

The credit control department staff used to produce letters to customers to chase money on a typewriter. They can now push a button and generate three or four thousand letters. They will soon be able to automatically e-mail or fax them.

“Because it is so much faster, the new system has improved our debt collection and reduced our debtor-days days,” says Dean. “It has also reduced our overheads by approximately two full-time equivalents, because instead of handling paper they are doing more productive work.”

The company receives 500 purchase invoices each day, which are all scanned and connected to the purchase order. It is then checked against the scanned Goods Received Note. If everything matches, the invoice is ready for payment. If there are discrepancies, it is sent electronically to the branch manager to investigate and approve manually.

“Before it would be passed around internally and could take days,” says Dean. “We can now scan an invoice, pass it through to the right person, approve it, and send it back right away.”

The company used to run a UNIX-based payroll system, which had limited reporting functionality and had no connection to the old accounting system. It used to produce long printouts from the weekly and monthly payrolls that were used to manually key a journal entry into the accounting system, and it would take one person a whole day for each payroll run.

The Earnie/32 Windows-based wages system was selected as a replacement, because it fully integrates with Microsoft Dynamics GP. “We now push a button and it all goes directly into [Microsoft] Dynamics GP in 30 seconds,” says Dean. “It has saved 20 per cent of one person’s time.”

Each day the company downloads its bank statement into the accounting system, where most are automatically matched with the payments in the accounting system. “With 6,000 transactions a month, it has saved our accounts manager, a key member of staff, several days a month,” says Dean.

The company made a decision not to radically change its business processes at the same time as it changed its timber management software, as this would have been too disruptive for the 350 users. “After two months, when the users are comfortable with the new system, our three analysts are going to significantly streamline our business processes so that we have the slickest timber systems that anyone will ever see,” promises Dean.

“We have achieved a significant vision for a company our size, to develop a totally integrated and seamless Microsoft Windows-based platform for 350 people,” concludes Andrew Laver. “Our 18 branches now have full access to information in Microsoft Dynamics GP to give all users access to real-time financial information. It is state-of-the-art for the timber industry.”